Homily for the Mass of Christian Burial for Mary Curnutte

This morning we had two baptisms. This afternoon we have a funeral. We have completed the circle of the Christian life. There is something fulfilling about that. Several people have come up to me in the last couple of weeks and said, “This has been a rough year for you, losing both parents in the same year.” While there is some truth to that, in many other ways, this has been one of the best years I’ve ever had. My older daughter, Jennifer, and her husband, John, are going to be having a baby in the middle of March. My younger daughter, Kyla, is starting to make her own life and career at Ohio State. My business has picked up much momentum. My health is hanging in there. So it is true that “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under the sun. A time to be born and a time to die; a time to mourn and a time to dance ... and even at the grave, we make our song.”

At my father’s funeral in January, Father Tom Miles, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, Kansas, said something that has stuck with me. He said that part of the process of dealing with grief and loss is to tell the stories. By telling the stories of those who have died, we keep them alive; as long as we are telling their stories, they are still with us. It is through these stories that “we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.” So I must tell some of my mother’s story.

Mom was born here in Portsmouth, baptized here at All Saints, confirmed here at All Saints and married here at All Saints. Her family had been members of this parish for almost as long as it had been a parish. When my dad got out of the Navy at the end of World War II, we moved to Columbus so he could get his Ph.D. from Ohio State. In 1953, he took a job as Professor of Physics at Kansas State University and stayed there his entire career. After Dad retired, Mom and Dad stayed in Manhattan until he died. I moved Mom back here to Hillview Health Care then. She was wheelchair bound and there was no question about leaving her alone 850 miles from us.

Mom was the original disciplinarian. At least she was with me – not so much with my younger brother, Greg. I think she was that way because of her older brother, Bill Lukemire. He had been a pretty wild child and she was determined that her sons would not be. Mom and Bill’s mother remarked more than once that she would count her life a success if she could just keep him out of reform school. Mom had that same determination; she wasn’t going to raise two savages like her brother.

She was athletic and feisty when she was young. One day when I was in first grade, I rode the school bus home even though my school was only a couple of blocks from home and I had always walked. I had a friend who lived out in the country and who always rode the bus. That day I decided to ride with him. When the bus driver got to the end of his route, he had an extra passenger he didn’t know what to do with. When he finally got me home, it was 5 or 6 o’clock and I should have been there by 2:30 or 3:00. Those of you who are mothers will understand that as the bus pulled up in front of the house, Mom came running out and smothered me with hugs as mothers are prone to do. But then she told me to get in the house because I was going to get a spanking. I said something like, “You’re going to have to catch me first,” and took off running down the sidewalk. Guess what … yes, she caught me.

Another time back when my brother and I still shared a room – I must have been about 12 and he would have been about 6 – she had been after us for a long time to clean up our room. In the way of boys that age, our priority for that chore was pretty low because we knew where everything was and we didn’t understand the problem. But she had finally had enough, so she marched into our room, stripped all the sheets off the bed and threw them in the middle of the floor, took all the drawers out of the chests and turned them upside down on top of the sheets, cleaned all our books and toys off the shelves and took all the clothes out of the closet and threw them in the middle of the floor. Then she took one of our hockey sticks, stirred it all up and said, “NOW … clean it up!”

Mom was a very protective mother with me. When I was young, I often wanted to go hunting with my friends who lived on farms and hunted. That never happened until I was grown and gone. She would never have had a gun in the house. When I was 14, I wanted a motorcycle so much that I could taste it. I think her answer to that request was something like, “Not only no, but hell no.” The interesting thing is that once I left home, my brother was able to do all the things I had not been able to do and had all the things I wasn’t allowed to have. When I complained to my dad about the injustice of that, he smiled and said, “What can I say? Greg had experienced parents. You didn’t.”

Mom and Dad had one of those marriages that could be a model for us all. They truly enjoyed being with each other, and they were together from the time they started dating in high school until Dad died almost 63 years after they were married, a span of nearly 70 years. In my whole life, I never heard them fight. They did have some spirited discussions, but they never screamed at each other or called each other names. As they say now, they never disrespected each other.

One of those spirited discussions may have been after the “NOW … clean it up” episode, or it may have been the time Greg broke our fish aquarium and many gallons of water poured out on Mom’s Persian rug and my friend who had come over for lunch crawled out my bedroom window to avoid the fireworks. Mom and Dad were in the living room reviewing what had happened that day as they almost always did and I was in bed listening in. In those days I could hear a cat walking on carpet in the next room. Now I can’t hear anything much quieter than a jet engine. Anyway … I heard my Dad’s soft voice saying something that I couldn’t understand. Then my mother said, considerably louder, “And I suppose you think I overreacted. They’re still alive, aren’t they?”

Somewhere along the line, Mom contracted neuropathy. Neuropathy is an insidious condition that creeps up on you and steals your freedom and independence. In Mom’s case, it started in her legs and affected her balance. The first time I suspected something was wrong was probably 20 years ago. Becky and Jennifer and I were visiting Mom and Dad in Manhattan. We had gone out to play golf. Mom was standing on a green that sloped gently downhill, lining up her putt and just fell over backwards. She jumped right back up, but I thought that something wasn’t right. Over the years, her balance got worse and her legs got weaker until she was finally wheelchair bound probably 10 years ago.

Mom was also a musician, and a good one. She had attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music until she quit to marry Dad when he graduated from the Naval Academy. The neuropathy affected her hands and eventually she could no longer play the piano or the classical guitar, instruments she dearly loved. She also began to get very hard of hearing, a disability that her vanity wouldn’t let her deal with until it was almost too late to correct. Probably 20 years ago, Mom and Dad, my family and Greg’s family were vacationing together in Hawaii. Becky and my brother’s wife, Lauren, decided to be helpful and tell Mom that she really ought to get hearing aids. That intervention didn’t go over very well, and it was only 5 years ago or so that my Dad finally convinced her.

When Dad finally died, if Mom had been able to get out and about, visit her friends, play bridge, go to concerts and visit her grandchilden, she would have been able to work through her grief. But she was now a prisoner in a body she no longer knew and could no longer love. She was ready to go with Dad. She had had enough, but I think she stayed here for Greg and me. But when she had a stroke the weekend of October 10, that was just about the last straw. The stroke affected her speech and her swallowing. She started to aspirate everything that was in her mouth and that led to pneumonia.

She and Dad had Advanced Directives that made it very clear what kind of medical intervention they were willing to accept and what they weren’t. When Dr. Bonzo told me that to turn her around, we would have to suction her lungs, probably multiple times, put her on a CPAP machine or perhaps even a ventilator and maybe insert a feeding tube, I knew Mom would be horrified. I said, “No, just make her comfortable.” Dr. Bonzo said Mom probably had two days left. Before I left to get supper at 6:30 that evening, I gave her a hug and a kiss and told her, “If you’re ready to go, it’s OK.” She was gone in less than two hours.

Many of the very things that made Mom who she was, some of which we’ve been laughing about affectionately, became a really heavy burden of guilt for her. In her later days, she began to think she had treated me and Greg and Dad badly. We, of course, had long ago recognized that she was not perfect, but we also recognized that whatever she had done was out of love for us. That was what was important to us. Her obsession reminds me of the story about two monks, one who was old and wise, and one who was young and just starting the monastic life. The order they belonged to was one that didn’t allow them to touch women. In fact, it didn’t even allow them to talk to women. One day they were walking from one monastery to another when they came to a waist-deep stream they needed to cross. On the bank of the stream was a young woman obviously very distressed. The older monk took pity on her and asked her what was wrong. She said, “I need to cross this stream, but I can’t swim.” Without hesitation, the older monk picked her up, carried her across the stream, set her down on the other side, wished her a good day and continued his walk down the road. The younger monk was outraged and nagged the older one all the rest of the day, saying, “I can’t believe you spoke to that woman. It’s completely against the rules of the order. And then you not only touched her, you actually picked her up and carried her across the stream. It’s just outrageous.” That evening, when the monks had reached their destination and were ready to go to bed, the younger one was still nagging. The older monk looked at him and said, “You know, I put that woman down miles and miles ago. Why are you still carrying her?”

Mom carried guilt like that. It got to the point that when my Dad died, she was almost inconsolable. She couldn’t understand how Dad and Greg and I could love her. I finally had to do an intervention and told her, “Dad and Greg and I love you with no strings attached. We know you weren’t perfect, but we know that we weren’t perfect either. Since you seem to need this, we now formally forgive you for anything you feel guilty about. But you need to forgive us for our sins too.” I should have done that a long time ago; she didn’t obsess about it anymore.
So if there is a lesson to be drawn from Mom’s life which I can share with you, it is this. If you are carrying heavy burdens of guilt or of grudges, set them down. Let them go. Ask forgiveness from anyone you have injured and grant forgiveness to anyone who asks you for it. That includes you yourself. As the lesson from Lamentations that we just listened to says, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.” Jesus later commanded us to show that same mercy to each other and to ourselves.

So, Mom, now go with God. As our Gospel lesson from John told us, Jesus went and prepared a place for you. He has now come again and taken you to himself, so that where he is, there you may be also.

Amen.